Digital Parenting Minute

Control Location Services in iOS

Do you want every single app to have access to your child’s location information? You can change that through the Location Services settings in iOS. In today’s video, we’ll walk you through how to access, edit, and lock these settings for your child.

Transcript

Being able to see where your child is at by tracking their phone, that’s a cool feature. But do you want every application on their phone to have that same information? Chances are they might be able to access more of that information than you want them to. Now, in this episode, I will walk you through the process of controlling who gets access to your child’s location information. Let’s do it.

There are two different ways that you can edit what has access to your location data on an iOS device. Both ways can be found within the settings app. First, to edit the list of what applications can access your location information, select privacy and then location services. From this list, you can click on an application and select when it has access to your location information. You can even choose to not let it have any access to that information.

Now, there is another way to change location settings. If you’re handing your phone to one of your children, you can leverage the restrictions feature that we have discussed previously to fine tune the list of applications that have access to the device’s location data. From here, go back to the general list in settings. Next, select restrictions. You’ll need to press the enable restrictions button if you haven’t enabled it yet. Once you do, you’ll need to set a passcode. This passcode will be used to edit or disable the restrictions on this device. From here, scroll down to the location services option. You will now see a similar list of applications with their current access to your location information. If you edit settings here, they will be in effect until you disable restrictions.